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Monday, March 4, 2013

Blood Flats: Chapters 11 to 20

Lee came upon the family so quickly and
unexpectedly that he had no time to hide himself from their view.

He had followed the
trail through the woods, and before long he strayed into an area of forest that
he recognized as state land: He could tell because the trails were well kept
and covered with mulch in many places. He was not worried about game wardens.
They rarely appeared in Hawkins County—and then only during hunting season.

He had not expected
to come across the campground so soon, though; and the family was a complete
surprise. There was no time to avoid them. He stepped into a clearing and there
they were: A mother, a father, and two small children—a boy and a girl. The
parents looked to be in their mid-thirties. The children were perhaps seven or
eight years old. Possibly twins.

All four of them were
seated in folding lawn chairs. They were relaxing in the shade of a pull-out
awning. The awning was attached to a Northstar camper that had been towed into
place by a Ford pickup truck.

Lee had strayed into the family’s weekend camping
expedition. A scuffed Coleman cooler sat atop a wooden picnic table that was
county property. There was also a pitcher of what looked like lemonade. The
lemonade had been heavily iced, and the pitcher was coated with condensation.

This was in fact the
Shady Pond Campground. The waters of the eponymous pond glittered some distance
off to the west. A wooden sign with a silhouette of the state of Kentucky
confirmed the name of the campground.

The father of the family started when he saw Lee
step out from the trees. He did not appear to feel threatened, only mildly
surprised. He obviously did not believe that anything bad would happen to him
at the campground on a sunny Saturday morning. He had a day off work. He was
with his family and all was right with the world.

Lee noted that the
man also had protection: a high-powered hunting rifle stood leaned against the
camper. The presence of the gun did not particularly surprise Lee: Guns were a
fact of life in Hawkins County. This was Second Amendment country. Practically
everyone grew up handling firearms. The opening day of deer season in
mid-November was a major local event.

Lee assiduously
avoided a second glance at the weapon. His own .45 was tucked in the back of
his pants, where none of the family members could see it.

As inconspicuously as
possible, Lee untucked his shirt so that it would fall over the grip of the
gun. This gesture might arouse some suspicion; but the situation might
deteriorate quickly if they glimpsed the gun. He would still need to keep his
back to them: the shape of the .45 would be quite noticeable beneath his shirt.

“Whoa! Good morning,
mister!” the father hailed.

Lee believed that he
recognized the father. Like the dark-bearded shooter at the Tradewinds, he was
one of that nameless or half-named mass of Perryston residents whom Lee knew
vaguely by sight. He had a goatee, a receding hairline, and the beginnings of a
middle-age paunch.

“Good morning,” Lee replied. Did he sound unsteady? It would be a struggle, he knew, to affect a
casual manner after what he had seen and done only a short while ago.

“That’s a good way to
scare a fella, comin’ out of the woods like that.”

The delivery of these
last words was not unfriendly; but Lee noted that the man had involuntarily
looked in the direction of his rifle.

“I’ll say,” his wife
agreed. “I thought we had the campgrounds to ourselves.”

“Well, it is a public
campground,” her husband allowed. Then to Lee: “Where are you parked?”

“Over there,” Lee
motioned to an unspecified area behind him. “On the other side of the woods. I
have a camper too.”

“It looks like you’ve
been sleeping in the woods,” the woman said.

Lee knew that he probably did look like a mess—even
in the unceremonious setting of a campground. He was sweating profusely by now
in his jeans and tee shirt—which were less than ideal clothes for a
cross-country run. Briars clung to his pants legs. Impolite though her
observation was, the woman had a point.

Had the family gotten word of the morning’s events at the Tradewinds?
Probably not. Lee didn’t see a radio or a battery-powered
television set.

Lee nodded. There was
no way he could plausibly deny his identity before a person who recognized him.
Not in a small town like Perryston.

“I read all about
you,” the man continued. “I saw that article in the Perryston Gazette. It says you won a bunch of medals over there.”

“I wouldn’t put it
that way,” Lee said. My God, is this
going to be another request for war stories, he wondered.

“Bullshit!” the man
said, his smile broadening. “You’re a hero. That’s what you are.” He stood up
from his lawn chair. The man was a good four or five inches taller than Lee. He
walked over and shook Lee’s hand, then clapped him on the shoulder. “I’d be
honored if you’d stay and have lunch with us.”

“I appreciate the
offer,” Lee said. “I really do. But I can’t.”

“Well, give it some
thought. My name’s Tradd. Tradd Mentzel. Maybe you’d like a beer. I’ve got some
Buds in the cooler.”

“It’s a little early
for beer,” Lee said. “But I would be very grateful if you’d give me a glass of
that lemonade.” And the thought of the lemonade did make Lee grateful: He was
dehydrated after his long run through the woods.

Tradd’s recognition
of Lee—and his identification as a war hero—had resulted in an immediate change
of his status within the family group. He had gone from interloper to honored
guest. Even Jenny was regarding him favorably now. She wasted no time in
lifting herself from her lawn chair to search for a drinking cup among the
family’s belongings. The children stirred from their chairs as well. The entire
family was suddenly on their feet.

“Make it a big cup,
Jenny,” Tradd said to his wife. “Lee here looks like he’s about ready to die of
thirst. Use one of the big red tumblers.”

Lee expressed more
thanks, and then Tradd said: “I was very sorry to hear about your mother. I
know it was a few years ago; but well—please accept my condolences.”

“Thank you,” Lee
said.

“How old was she?”
Tradd asked gently.

“Forty-two.” In that
instant Lee recalled the last time he had seen his mother: She had been a small
woman to begin with, and the cancer had wasted her away to a state of
emaciation. At five-foot-four, she had weighed eighty-two pounds when she died.
Lee remembered her staring back at him on that last day in the hospital, barely
conscious in the last stages of her disease—and they had filled her with
painkillers as well.

“She was a wonderful
woman,” Tradd said. “She used to babysit my older brother way back when. I’ve
heard nothing but good things about her.”

Lee could not think
of a suitable response. Talking about his parents was, for him, a bit like
talking about the war. It was a subject that he didn’t like to discuss—least of
all with people whom he did not know well.

Since his mother had
died, he had often heard remarks like that: about how wonderful she had been.
No one had ever said as much about his father. Tom McCabe had been born in
nineteen sixty-four. Tall and good-looking, he had been a notorious ladies’ man
throughout most of the nineteen eighties. You’ve
got your father’s good looks, an aunt of Lee’s used to say when he was an
adolescent. Her tone was not complimentary, as if a resemblance to his father
was not an entirely good thing. Never mind that his father had been so popular
with the girls.

Lee’s mother had certainly been taken
with Tom McCabe—even though they had split up shortly after Lee was born.
Throughout Lee’s growing up years, when she had been a single mother in her
twenties—and then in her thirties—there had been no other serious love interests.
Lee could not recall her going on many dates, nor even talking to other men on
many occasions.

Lee realized that his
mother had been waiting—hoping—for a fairytale reconciliation. One day your father will settle down,
she used to say. He’ll grow up. Then
you’ll see: we’ll be a real family yet.

That had been the
catechism of Lee’s childhood and adolescence. Then one evening his father had
run a red light after consuming enough alcohol to intoxicate two men. His car
plowed into the grill of a semi at sixty miles per hour. Thus ended the life of
Tom McCabe, and Lori McCabe’s hope of the fairytale ending.

Snap out of it, Lee thought. You don’t have the time or the latitude to
be sorting out your childhood right now.

Jenny was pouring him
a generous portion of lemonade. The red tumbler was in fact large, as Tradd had
promised. Lee accepted the cup with a nod and smile, wondering how fast he
dared drink it. He couldn’t afford to linger; but the lemonade would provide
much needed energy and hydration.

“Zack, this man here
is a war hero,” Tradd said, addressing his son.

Lee took a long drink
of lemonade, and in that instant little Zack darted out of his field of vision.
His next words turned Lee’s bowels to ice.

“He must be a soldier, Dad. Look—he’s even got a gun!”

Zack was behind Lee
now and slightly off to the side. He was pointing at the shape of Lee’s .45 in
the small of his back.

“What are you talking
about, Zack? Don’t fib or I’ll have to tan your hide. And didn’t your mother
and I tell you that it’s impolite to point?”

“He’s not lying,” Lee
said. He had just thought of another way out. It might work. He had a gun. Tradd had a gun. Nothing
unusual there. So what?

“I saw a wild dog around my campsite
this morning. It looked mean. I’ve been carrying this pistol around just in
case.”

Tradd nodded. “Got to
watch those strays,” he said. Something about his tone—and the expression on
his face—suggested that he was not wholly convinced by Lee’s explanation. Lee
couldn’t blame him. From Tradd’s perspective, Lee thought, this scenario didn’t
entirely add up. A man comes out of the woods into your family’s campsite,
dirty and disheveled. Next you discover that he’s carrying a gun.

Then they were all
distracted by the sound of electronic chimes playing the William Tell Overture.
Tradd reached into his jeans pocket and pulled out a cell phone.

“My sister,” he said,
examining the number on the screen. “Hold on a sec, okay?”

Tradd put the cell
phone up to his ear. “Yep. No, I haven’t heard…” And now a shadow of real concern
darkened his face. “At that trailer park?....How many killed?....Who would…?”

He stared directly at
Lee. They locked eyes. Then Tradd dropped his stare as if nothing had happened.
He made a great show of not looking at Lee.

“Would you excuse me
for a minute, Mr. McCabe? I’ll be right back.” Tradd swallowed awkwardly, then
turned on his heels and spun in the direction of the camper. He was making a
beeline not for the door, but for the high-powered rifle.

“Stop,” Lee said.

Little Zack cried out
and Jenny gasped.

When Tradd turned
back around, halfway to the camper, Lee was holding the .45 at waist level.
“Step away from that gun.”

Damn it! Lee thought. Standing here before this family, the
gun felt like a diseased and filthy thing in his hand. He tried to reconcile
this feeling with the realization that there had been no other choice: Tradd
paused and looked guiltily back at his firearm. He had been going for the
rifle. That would have meant another set of unworkable alternatives: Maybe
Tradd was planning on making a citizen’s arrest, and maybe he was—in the heat
and fear of the moment—planning to simply gun down the murder suspect who had
come among his family under false pretenses.

In all probability,
it would have been a gunfight—a gunfight that the father of two would surely
have lost.

Lee had not ordered
Tradd to raise his hands, but he raised them nonetheless. His Adam’s apple
bobbed as he swallowed. “Please don’t hurt my family, McCabe. Oh, God, if you
hurt my family I swear I’ll track you down and I’ll kill you, marine or not,
I’ll-”

“Shut up!” Lee
snapped. “I’m not going to hurt anyone. I haven’t hurt anyone, though someone’s
obviously given you the idea that I’ve killed some folks.” He turned to Jenny:
“Bring your kids and stand over there by your husband.”

Jenny was trembling.
She did not move.

“Do what he says,
Jenny!” Tradd said.

Jenny summoned the
kids to her in a series of frantic, whispered words. There were tears in her
voice. The daughter started crying; and little Zack—who had been so interested
in Lee’s gun a moment ago—was now whimpering softly.

The entire family was
huddled together. Tradd was doing his best to look brave but he made a poor job
of it.

I mean them no harm but I feel like a son-of-a-bitch, Lee thought. He wondered how many times this scene had played out
during the Sunni-Shiite violence and sundry internecine bloodshed that had so
plagued the American occupation of Iraq: A man holding a gun on unarmed
civilians—men, women and children.

He knew that his
intentions were nothing like that; but he could not ignore the analogy. Tradd,
Jenny, and their two children were obviously terrified, wondering what was
going to happen next.

Lee walked over to
the rifle where it stood leaning against the side of the camper. He plucked it
away with his left hand.

“I’m going to take
your gun,” he explained. “But I’m not stealing it. I’ll place it somewhere in
the grass back there.” Lee gestured to the grassy field between the pond and
the woods. “You’ll be able to find it. Do you understand?”

Tradd nodded. A
response seemed to be beyond Jenny’s capabilities at the moment. The children
continued their sobbing.

“Now I want you all
to turn around.” Lee said.

“You’re going to
shoot us in the back!” Jenny said.

“No I’m not. If I was
planning to shoot you, I would have done it by now. Just do as I say.”

Lee was looking at
the backs of the family. A family that had been enjoying a pleasant Saturday
morning at a campground until he had crossed their path.

“Count until one
hundred before you turn around,” Lee said, as he backed away, holding the .45
in his right hand and Tradd’s high-powered rifle in his left.

The family kept their
backs turned to Lee while he departed. He did not want to look at them, but it
was necessary. Tradd might attempt to rush him when his guard was down. Some
men were like that, Lee knew. They had a childlike obsession with being heroes;
and they could not resist the doomed, heroic gesture—even if it would serve no
purpose.

Once back in the
field on the other side of the pond, Lee laid the rifle down in the grass.

Little Zack furtively
turned around and spied Lee hunkered down near the ground. Lee smiled and waved
at the boy: He did not want Zack to be emotionally scarred by what had occurred
here this morning, though he knew that the boy would never forget the strange
man who had come from the forest bearing not gifts but a gun.

Zack did not return
the wave or the smile. He turned his back on Lee again, and wrapped his arms
around his mother.

Chapter

12.

Back into the woods again. Lee had no idea where he
was going now—except that he was still traveling south. It would be about noon:
He allowed himself a brief glance upward and saw that the sunlight filtering
through the tree leaves was intense, burning the outlines of branches into
negative images across his retinas.

Perhaps he had made a
mistake in leaving Tradd’s gun where the young father could find it. Tradd
might be tracking a short distance behind him even now, as the law was surely
tracking him.

He passed a deer
blind that was suspended about a foot off the ground. There would be no hunters
in June but the deer blind spooked him nonetheless: It reminded him of a
machine gun pillbox on four wooden legs: He imagined Sheriff Phelps taking aim
at him, sliding a rifle out from the wooden structure’s firing slit.

Was the image a premonition?Was that how this was all going to end? A bird darted across a
shaft of sunlight in the middle of the trail and Lee started, expecting Tradd
or Sheriff Phelps or perhaps someone else.

Calm down, he told himself. You have to think. You have to get your wits about you.

Lee also found that
he was haunted by the parting look that the boy, Zack, had given him. He pictured
the young boy telling his grandchildren about the incident someday, the way
that old-timers sometimes told stories about chance encounters with famous
outlaws from the 1920s. He knew that he was no John Dillinger or Baby Face
Nelson; and at this exact hour much of the county still regarded him as a war
hero. But that collective opinion of him would surely change—just as Tradd’s
opinion of him had shifted in the flicker of an instant. The false accusations
and the circumstantial evidence would be enough to damn him in most people’s
minds.

Whatever Lee’s true motivations,
whatever the truth of what had happened in the trailer, the young father would
recall only one fact: that Lee had held a gun on him and, by extension, his
family. And when the law learned of the incident it would only add to the
weight of his apparent guilt. He was going to end up dead or behind bars—and probably dead—through a series of
his own miscalculations and plain bad luck.

The trail descended
and rose again and the woods abruptly ended. Beyond the woods was not the uncut
meadow or cultivated field that he might have expected, but a stripped
landscape of dirt and uprooted trees. The land had been cleared in a wide
semicircle, and the uncomfortable fantasy of being an outlaw in the woods gave
way to an even more uncomfortable reality: He was an outlaw in the open
daylight.

Lee heard the sounds
of the heavy equipment before he saw the men working: A county work crew was
adding an extension to Route 257: The new road would pass by the campground
where Lee had been an unwelcome guest at the campsite of Tradd and his family.

He sensed that he was
walking into a bad situation; but once again going back the way he had come was
not an option. Lee walked forward, trying his best to appear nonchalant, hoping
that he would be able to make his way without attracting attention. It was a
hope that soon proved futile.

“Hey, you can’t cut through here!” the
leader of the work crew shouted at Lee above the rumbling of a road grader. He
was in his early fifties and he had a considerable paunch. He badly needed a
shave and a cigarette dangled from his lips. The crew leader had been talking
to the crewman operating the grader when he noticed Lee. The massive yellow
machine was about to transform a strip of this bumpy field into a more level
surface that would become the next increment of the Route 257 extension. Black
smoke belched from the machine’s vertical exhaust pipe.

The crew leader
signaled for the crewman operating the road grader to hold on for a moment. He
came jiggling over to Lee, shaking his head and muttering beneath his breath—no
doubt cursing this fool who didn’t have the sense to stay away from a
construction site.

“You can’t cut
through here!” the crew leader said. He was close enough for Lee to smell the
man’s sweat and the cigarette.

The .45 was tucked in
the waistband of Lee’s pants at the small of his back. Lee did not think that
any of the county work crew members were close enough to notice the outline of
the gun beneath his shirt. But they were pausing their tasks and gawking now,
as men engaged in tedious work will do in the presence of any unexpected
diversion.

“I’ll stay away from the equipment,” Lee
said. He knew that these words would not placate the man even before they were
out of his mouth.

“No, you don’t
understand,” the crew leader said. “This is a restricted area. You get hurt
here and the county is liable. That would mean my ass and probably my job. I’m
not going to lose my job because some fella wants to take a hike through the
woods.”

“I’m just passing
through,” Lee said.

The operator of the road grader had now killed the
engine of his machine and was climbing down from the cab.

The crew boss removed
his cigarette from his mouth, turned his head and spat in the dirt. “I can’t
let you through here. Look—we’ve got pits and trip hazards all over the place.
This is a dangerous area.”

I’ve witnessed a double murder, for which I’m now on the run, and this
guy wants me to concern myself with “trip hazards” Lee thought.

Nevertheless, Lee was
now facing a potential confrontation with two men, as the crewman from the road
grader was beginning to walk toward him. He was a large man who looked like he
had a temper—the sort of guy who regularly engaged in knock-down-drag-out bar fights
on Friday nights—just for fun.

“What’s the matter,
dude? You hard a hearin’?” the road grader driver called out. “You’re in a
restricted area.”

A few more exchanges
of words and there might be a real confrontation, Lee realized. He had the .45
of course, and the crew boss would back down in an instant if he saw it. But
that would expose his presence to yet another set of witnesses. And the crewman
from the road grader might call Lee’s bluff. Some men were daring and stupid
enough to charge a loaded firearm.

“Tell me where I can go,” Lee said.

“Now that’s the
spirit,” the crew boss said. “You got two choices: Go back in the direction you
came from, or take that road outta here.” He jabbed a thumb toward a gently
declining hill at the edge of the construction area. Lee could see pavement
through the breaks in the trees.

Since Lee could not
retrace his steps in the direction of Tradd, he would have to go down the hill,
then.

He eased his way backward, taking short steps so
that he would not take a pratfall and then roll down the hill. The road crew
probably interpreted this maneuver as fear of an attack. In reality, this was
the only way Lee could keep them from seeing the .45.

“Show’s over!” the
crew boss shouted to his subordinates, seeing that Lee was going. “Back to
work!”

Lee walked through a
short band of trees and undergrowth and came out on a two-lane highway. His
first impulse was to head for the grassy expanse on the opposite side of the
road. Another forest lay beyond it.

Then he heard the thucka-thucka of the helicopter.

Chapter

13.

For Lee the sound of helicopters would forever have
an association with Iraq, But the helicopter was no Marine Corps bird. This was
a Kentucky State Police helicopter. It was making wide circles across the
fields and forests, following a general trajectory down the highway.

Perhaps Phelps had
not pursued him into woods, after all. The sheriff had chosen to work smart
rather than hard. Lee could appreciate the reasoning of his adversary. The
sheriff would have looked more heroic if he had engaged in a foot chase. But
that would have ultimately been fruitless. Lee was both younger and fitter. He
had had a head start on the lawman. Phelps had no doubt taken these factors
into account. He was thinking strategically rather than emotionally.

And now Lee had to control his own emotions if he
intended to keep his life and his freedom.

There would be two
men—possibly three—circling above him in the helicopter. He imagined them
looking down on him through a pair of binoculars. Yes, that’s the man, they would be saying. He’s the one who killed those two people in that trailer.

If he fled across the
field into the woods, he would draw the helicopter down upon him. A lone man
racing across an empty field would not go unnoticed from their vantage point.
They would descend upon him and call in more units and drive him into a noose.

Nor could he go back
the way he came. And yet, he would draw attention if he merely walked down the
highway.

A short ways down the
road was a feed and agricultural supply store. Surely the general citizenry
would not be alerted of his fugitive status yet. He could go in there and mill
about for five or ten minutes, pretending to be another shopper. By that time
the helicopter would be gone.

The aircraft made
another circle in the general area above him. Had he already caught their attention?

He began to walk
toward the agricultural supply store, his steps as deliberate and natural as he
could manage them. There was a sign in the parking lot that advertised special
pricing on herbicides. Another sign declared a deal on a device that captured
carpenter bees.

Lee was within a few
yards of the parking lot when he realized that the .45 was still jammed in his
belt.

A pickup truck rolled
past him from behind, slowed, and idled into the parking space near the front
entrance of the store. What a damn fool he had been; the gun would have been in
clearly visible from the front seat of the truck. Lee was lucky if the driver
had not seen it, in fact; hopefully he had not been paying attention.

A sunburned man clad
in jeans, a stained tee shirt, and John Deere cap climbed out of the parked
pickup truck and walked through the front entrance of the supply store without
giving Lee so much as a glance. He had been
lucky; but he had to do something about the gun before another vehicle drove
past.

The sound of the
helicopter’s engine seemed to grow louder as it roared overhead again. He
risked a brief glance at the sky: The chopper was moving away from him now,
though he knew it would circle back, sweeping the area in a series of wide,
gradually shifting arcs.

There was a culvert
at the edge of the parking lot. Lee did his best to ascertain that no one was
watching him. Then reached behind his back and removed the gun from his belt.
He knelt and pretended to tie one of his boot strings. He slid the gun into the
mouth of the drainage pipe, and pushed it far enough into the corrugated steel
opening so that no one would notice it.

Then he stood up. The
police helicopter was growing louder again. Hopefully the men above him had not
noticed the lone figure stooping to push an object into a drainage pipe.

Lee crammed his hands
into his pockets and walked toward the main entrance of the store. Two other
shoppers walked past him, exiting the store: one with a bag of seed slung over
his shoulder, another carrying a newly purchased shovel and hoe. Neither man
was familiar.

The automatic glass
door slid open and Lee stepped into the air-conditioned interior. The floors
were bare concrete and the main area of the store was a maze of pallets: Many
of the items that farmers bought were packaged in bulky sacks, bundles, and
buckets. The pallets were stacked waist-high or shoulder-high. Along the outer
perimeter of the main room were shelves of smaller items: hand tools and
containers of insecticide, work gloves and spare parts for farm equipment.

At the back of the customer
area was a television mounted near the ceiling on a steel frame. A group of
three men and one woman were gathered around the set.

I need to kill about five or ten minutes in here, Lee thought. Just enough time
for the police helicopter to move on. Lee prayed that none of the shoppers
would recognize him. Of course, he had many friends and acquaintances in the
county, and his picture had recently been in the paper following his return
from Iraq.

Lee buried his face
in a newspaper-sized promotional circular that was lying on an adjacent stack
of boxes. The boxes contained a chemical fertilizer that was—according to the
words printed on the cardboard—specially formulated for use on soybeans. The
circular had been printed by the Burpee seed company.

He pretended to
divide his attention between the circular and the television set. This
strategy, he decided, would make him less noticeable than a deliberate and
obvious effort at seclusion. He stood just outside the gaggle of shoppers
watching the television.

The broadcast was a
news magazine talk show of some sort. The show’s host was interviewing a
middle-aged, bearded author. When the camera panned on the interview subject,
the man’s name and source of distinction were identified by electronically
generated letters: “Brett St.
Croix, author of The Death Factory: How
the U.S. Military Turns American Youths into Killers”

The interview had
apparently been underway for a while, and St. Croix was in the middle making a
particular argument.

“Militant Islam is
nothing more than a reaction against Western interventionism!” St. Croix
declared. The camera angle shifted from the author and the host to the studio
audience. The author’s comments elicited a few groans from the crowd—but these
groans were drowned out by a larger volume of cheers. “And we shouldn’t be
intervening in the Middle East!”

Lee was in no mood
for politics at the moment; but he found himself, ironically, welcoming the
distraction from his more immediate predicament.

By God, I agree with you, Lee thought,
repeating the author’s last statement in his own mind. Though for an entirely different set of reasons.

Hawkins County was red-blooded patriot territory;
but Lee knew that the war in Iraq had been less than popular in many quarters
of the country at large. He had seen the protesters on television and on the
Internet. In fact, he had watched more than a few news reports of these
protests while in Iraq. There was a television in the rec room of the fortified
compound that had been his home in Iraq. On more than one occasion, he had
subjected himself to the irony of these televised protests against the war,
only hours or minutes before the Marine Corps subjected him to the real
thing.

The protesters don’t get it, Lee thought. Even when they are right, they are right by
accident.

There were
perspectives on militant Islam and great power intervention that the media
mostly chose to ignore. Lee remembered one particular Iraqi village that he and
his fellow marines had entered during an anti-insurgent sweep. They had found
no al-Qaeda in the village; but they had found something else that made Lee
question the ultimate success and meaning of the U.S. mission in Iraq.

In the center of the
village a group of men had been gathered around the body of teenaged girl. Her
arms were bound around her waist. To Lee’s horror, the girl had been buried up
to her waist in the sand so that the men could more easily pelt her to death
with rocks.

The girl had already
been dead by the time the marines arrived. The village men were in the last
stages of their rock-throwing. A few members of Lee’s squad had fired in the
air to make them stop. The marine interpreter had shouted at the male
villagers, demanding an explanation.

There was much
shouting, and more than a few threats hurled in both directions. Gradually the
story came together. The sixteen-year-old girl had been married off to a man
three times her age. Her father had wanted a choice patch of land that belonged
to the prospective groom, who already had two middle-aged wives and four
children who were older than his new bride.

Apparently the young
girl had been quite beautiful, and she had attracted many admirers. Trouble had
arisen when the girl’s husband had decided that she was too flirtatious with a
young man in the village. Nothing had ever been proven; but there were damning
accusations. The young man had fled one night in terror. The girl had remained
to face the summary justice of the Quran. Her father and her estranged husband
were among the men who had thrown the stones.

There was nothing
about the girl that looked flirtatious or beautiful now, with half of her torso
buried in the sand, her hair matted with blood, her face a mass of
contusions.

Is this the society that we are fighting to preserve? Lee had thought, as he looked at the smashed concavity that had once
been the nose of the young girl. Is this
what I am risking my life for?

Standing in the feed
store now, Lee recalled the dark, violent impulse that had seized him in that
moment, as he had looked from the crushed, swollen face of the teenage girl to
the sullen faces of her male executioners. He had wanted to gun down all of
those men who had thrown the stones, to slaughter them in a righteous fury of
the Old Testament variety. In the end he had restrained himself; but there had
been moments since then when he had wished he had killed them—every last one of
them.

These reminiscences
came to an abrupt stop when there was a sudden change in the programming. The
talk show was interrupted by a news bulletin.

Lee didn’t wait to
hear if the news broadcaster mentioned his name, or to see if they flashed a
photo of him across the screen. No doubt that would come with time. He turned
as soon as soon as he heard the words “multiple shootings” and the name of the
trailer park.

On the way out he
bumped into a man who looked familiar. He greeted Lee with a smile. “Say aren’t
you?” he began—for this man had not seen the images on the television.

Lee nodded and
brushed past him, then out the main entrance of the store. He scanned the sky:
there was no helicopter in the burnt blue haze, and its sound was gone as well.

He knelt by the culvert
and quickly pulled the gun from the drainage pipe. He shoved it into his belt
and stepped onto the two-lane highway. There was the screech of brakes, and a
horn blared. Lee leapt aside as the driver of an old Ford Mustang shook his
fist and accelerated again. Watch where
the hell you’re going he shouted, mouthing the words through his windshield
as Lee, more than a little dazed, silently stared back at him.

Chapter

14.

Hal Marsten pulled the curtains of his kitchen
window back a few inches. He saw Sheriff Phelps and his deputy talking to some
of his neighbors. They did not notice him looking—which was just fine with him.
The other residents of the Tradewinds were obsessed with the violent events
that had occurred less than an hour ago.

But he was the only
one who had actually seen the shootings.

Hal Marsten spent a
lot of time watching the world through his window. He had never been much of
talker. Tense social situations made him anxious. Sometimes his neighbors made
him anxious—they way they looked at him and asked him awkward questions. Often
it wasn’t the spoken questions themselves, but the subtext behind them that
made him nervous. For example, when they said, “Watcha doin’ Hal?” they really
meant: “How come you live all alone, Hal?” “How come you don’t have a wife or
girlfriend at the age of fifty-one?” The years had made him an expert at
deciphering these meanings.

Women had always made
him anxious. Especially the much younger ones—like Jody White, the young woman
who had lived with Tim Fitzsimmons. Why
would she take up with a guy like that? Hal asked himself. On a few
occasions he had dared to nod hello to Jody White, but most of the time he
averted his glance when she came into his range of vision. Where Jody was, Tim
Fitzsimmons was never far behind; and Hal could tell that Tim was a mean one.
He glared at you like he would just as soon kill you as say hello.

Hal knew that men like
that were best avoided. Trouble was best avoided. If you avoided trouble, you
could keep things simple, and people would leave you alone. Most of the time.

This morning, though,
Hal had seen some real trouble. He
had seen the four armed men enter the trailer across the road. He had seen the
struggle that had ensued after they burst inside. The way they grabbed Tim
Fitzsimmons as he was trying to run away, and without so much as saying another
word they shot him in the head. He wasn’t sorry to see them kill Tim
Fitzsimmons—not really, being the sort of man that he obviously was. But then
they shot Jody once in the face and once in the abdomen. He figured that they
had probably shot Tim Fitzsimmons because of a dispute over drugs—but why did
they have to go and shoot Jody, too? Why the hell would anyone—even bad men—do
a damned thing like that?

He stepped away from
his window and slid into a chair at his kitchen table. The buzz of voices went
on unabated outside. He stared at his hands and saw that they were trembling.
This was all too much. Things had happened too fast for him to process.

He didn’t know why he
had failed to speak for Lee McCabe when the young man called to him. A part of
him wanted to come to ex-marine’s rescue, to tell his neighbors what he had
seen—that McCabe was completely innocent and had had no part in the killings.

But then he had felt
his chest seize up and his throat go dry. A dozen little scenarios began
running through his head: What if his neighbors laughed at him, as his grade
school and high school classmates so often said. (Good God, Hal was thankful that those days were long in the past.)
What if they challenged him, calling him a liar? Then he might end up in a
world of trouble along with McCabe.

Well, maybe that last
thought was far-fetched—and maybe it wasn’t. But he couldn’t take any chances
right now. Lee McCabe might have problems, but he wasn’t the only one. Hal had
a big problem of his own—and it wouldn’t go away, no matter what happened to
Lee McCabe.

His eyes darted to the
telephone mounted into the kitchen wall near his refrigerator. (Hal Marsten did
not own a cell phone. He did not make or receive enough calls to justify the
expense.) And he thought about his mother: The only person who had ever been
nice to him.

Hal’s father had taken
off when he was two years old. He had no memory of the man. His parents were both
originally from Arkansas—so he had never gotten to know his extended relatives.
And after the hell of his school years, he had never overcome his social
anxiety to make many friends or acquaintances in the world at large.

It was only him and
Momma. And soon that might be at an end. It would be only him—alone against the
world.

He paused to consider
the enormity of this and he decided:
Someone else would tell the police about the armed men. Someone else
would have to take care of the matter for Lee McCabe.

Mamma was in the
hospital. Not just the local hospital in Perryston, but the big university
hospital in Lexington. She was in her early eighties now, and the doctors had
been warning her for years about her bad habits: She ate too much salt and too
many sweets. Worst of all, she smoked. A whole pack of Virginia Slims each day.
Sometimes a pack and a half.

He felt a warm,
familiar shape brush up against his calf. It was Bullet, the neutered tomcat
that he shared the trailer with. Well,
he thought ironically, I guess I do have
one additional friend: The cat had been very loyal—and Bullet, unlike
people, never asked him awkward questions or stared back at him in a way that
made him self-conscious and uncomfortable. The cat nuzzled against his leg
again and he rewarded it by leaning over to rub the soft, silky hair on the
feline’s head.

Yes, he had plenty to
manage without becoming involved in this trouble.

At the same time,
though, he knew what Mamma would say. If she were here and in better health,
advising him, she would tell him to overcome his fears and talk to the police.
You’ve got to find the courage to do what’s right, Hal, she always said. And he
had to grudgingly admit that this would indeed be the right thing to do. The ex-marine was in a real predicament.
A word from Hal might be enough to save him—if no one laughed at Hal or accused
him of telling tall tales to get attention

It was a real dilemma,
and Hal sorely wished that the matter would all simply go away. He was too
worried about Mamma. And getting involved in trouble would only lead to more
trouble. Wasn’t that the way things usually worked? Hadn’t his fifty-one years
taught him that he could best avoid problems by maintaining a low profile—by
keeping to himself?

Hal had nothing
against the young man who had gone to investigate the shootings in the trailer.
(He couldn’t help thinking, though, that Lee McCabe was at least partially
responsible for his own predicament.) But he did not want Lee McCabe’s problems
to become his own.

He had to keep his
priorities straight. Mamma needed him right now.

She needed him more
than Lee McCabe ever would.

Chapter

15.

After dodging the Mustang, Lee loped into the
field on the other side of the road. The driver of the Mustang had stopped
again and was shouting curses, yelling for Lee to come back.

Lee had doubly
offended the man, apparently: First he had stepped into the Mustang’s way, and
then he had turned his back on the driver’s shouts of confrontation.

He was dimly aware of
the car accelerating again, the roar of all eight cylinders accentuating its
driver’s anger. People were like that: They might be spoiling for a fight—but
not badly enough to chase a man across a field.

As he ran through the
high grass, he did not bother to look behind him. He knew that he would attract
attention out in the open. People did not normally exit stores and then
arbitrarily head for vacant land. If any customers in the parking lot had
noticed him, he had no doubt aroused their suspicions. There was nothing that
could be done about it.

A cluster of trees
beckoned him, promising at least temporary cover. He permitted himself a brief
glance upward just before he completed the final running steps into the shelter
of the massive, grey-brown trunks. The helicopter might circle back at any
moment, after all.

But for now he had
outwitted his pursuers. He did notice a vulture gliding silently overhead,
scanning the field and the highway for its rancid nourishment. While the
carrion-feeder’s significance of an omen was obvious, he forced himself to
dismiss it.

This was too much—to
be hunted from the air as well as from the ground. In Iraq the enemy had not
possessed helicopters. All aircraft had been friendly. On numerous occasions
help had in fact arrived from the skies. This was a new feeling—to fear the sky
and a mechanical bird of prey that was stalking him there.

This was not a trail
through a great woods, but merely a belt of forest between two areas of cleared
land. Lee had to navigate his way through a nasty patch of thorns that were
flourishing in the undergrowth. He broke through the briars and his right foot
came down on a pile of sticks. One of the sticks bolted and slithered quickly
away in a zigzagging pattern. He had disturbed a black snake.

Lee was not afraid of
snakes; and the non-venomous reptile might even be a favorable omen—certainly a
more auspicious one than the vulture.

Immediately beyond the
trees he came to a fence that consisted of three horizontal strands of rusted
steel wire strung between rotting wood posts. Thankfully the landowner who had
erected the fence some decades ago had not thought to use barbed wire.

As he grabbed a fence
post and hoisted one leg over the wire, he was all the more aware of his
vulnerability. He had heard that a lot of men had been killed in battle while
climbing over fences in fields such as this one—though probably in those days
they would have been made of split rails rather than rusted wire.

He was thinking not of
Iraq this time, but of a more chronologically distant conflict: During the War
between the States the Army of the Mississippi and the Army of the Ohio had
briefly clashed in Hawkins County. Confederate General Braxton Bragg and his
Union counterpart, Major General Don Carlos Buell, had each been tasked with
taking the area for their respective sides. There had been a series of
skirmishes nearby that local residents still referred to as the Battle of
Perryston. Lee had heard that it was still possible to find the occasional
Minié ball in the forest, though he had never met anyone who actually claimed
to have come across one.

Lee had barely touched
ground on the other side of the fence when a shot rang out. He instinctively
hit the ground, his chest pressed into the warm grass.

Then he realized that
the shot had been fired several miles away, and it had probably not been fired
in anger. An off-season hunter maybe, or a farmer shooing deer or vermin away
from his field.

There was no danger
from the shot but he was faced with yet another empty field and yet another road
beyond it. Lee stayed down while a pickup truck passed along what he believed
to be Route 168. Despite the wide open view the field afforded, the highway was
a good distance away. The driver did not appear to have noticed him; the truck
continued to chug away. Lee could hear its thirty-year-old engine rattle.

And then, overhead, he
heard the thucka-thucka of the state
police helicopter.

Would
this never end? Lee pressed his body against the ground,
knowing that his prone position really gave him no protection from the men in
the helicopter. If they flew directly over him, they would easily spot him.

The sound of the
helicopter’s engine and turning rotor grew closer. At least his tee shirt was a
drab color. But would that really offer
him any protection? He lay perfectly still, and even held his breath,
convinced that his flight from the state was about to come to an end.

His present situation
reminded him of one occasion in Iraq. He had been separated from his unit
during a firefight in a little town seventy kilometers west of Baghdad. For
more than two hours Lee had crouched behind the demolished façade of a clay
brick building. The building had been a store of some sort before a tank round
or a mortar had destroyed it. Lee deduced this fact from the remnants of
merchandise he had noticed in the rubble: candy bars smashed to shapeless
masses of stiff, hardened brown goo, punctured cola cans, and shattered CD
cases.

On the other side of the street, two
young men—Lee did not know if they had been al-Qaeda jihadis or Iraqi
fedayeen—had been firing at him from the second-story windows of a fully intact
building. The fighters appeared to be even younger than he was, probably no older
than sixteen or seventeen.

Lee later concluded
that the Arab fighters had not realized their advantage. Lee had been the only
U.S. Marine in a three-block area. If they had grasped the degree of his
isolation, the fighters could have descended from their perch and attacked him from
two opposing positions, enveloping Lee in crossfire that would have been
virtually inescapable.

But the two young men
in the plaid headscarves had remained in the building across the street. They
were able to pin Lee down but they were unable to sight him for a direct shot.
Apparently they had possessed no RPGs either. So they had fired almost randomly
into the rubble of the demolished store, hoping for a lucky ricochet. Lee,
meanwhile, made his body small against the cover of the rubble, radioed for
help, and returned fire conservatively: his ammunition had been running low.

Help had finally
arrived in the form of a light armored vehicle equipped with a 25-millimeter
Bushmaster chain gun. When he saw the LAV, Lee knew that the fight was all but
over, and his life was no longer forfeit. The LAV’s cannon took out the front
wall of the building that sheltered the two Arab fighters. The young men’s
bodies fell to the street in a shower of brown, dusty debris.

In the present
circumstances, Lee was even more isolated than he had been that day in Iraq.
Today there were no fellow marines to come to his aid. Having landed himself on
the wrong side of the law, he had more in common with the two young men in the
plaid headscarves than he did with his former comrades-in-arms.

Miraculously, the
helicopter veered east rather than passing directly over him. He watched its
tail rotor disappear over a high, thickly wooded knob of a hillside. But the
helicopter would be back.

There was a simple way
of ending this. He could hike back to town now, walk into Phelps’s office, and
turn himself in. Phelps wasn’t going to shoot him, after all. He would be
treated humanely, in accordance with the law. Yes, he would lose his
freedom—for a while. But what choice did he really have?

There would be an
investigation, of course. Forensics teams would comb the trailer for
fingerprints and fiber samples. With all Fitzsimmons’s drug-related traffic,
that would result in a list of dozens of unidentified visitors. Would that help
him or damn him? He didn’t know.

The inevitable
ballistics test was also an open question. The shots that killed Tim
Fitzsimmons and Jody White would not be traced to Lee’s .45; but how could Lee
prove that he had not discarded the actual murder weapon after fleeing the
trailer park?

There were so many
angles and directions that an investigation could follow; and he knew next to
nothing about actual police procedure. He couldn’t possibly figure it all out.

He removed his cell
phone from his pants pocket and dialed the emergency number for the Hawkins
County police department. He still recalled the number from his childhood. He
had memorized it when he was nine years old, as part of a fourth grade exercise
in local citizenship.

He was about to push
the cell phone’s send button when he heard the police siren.

Chapter

16.

Deputy
Ron Norris’s patrol car sped along Route 168, heading south, in the general
direction of the town of Blood Flats—a little burg that lay within the orbit of
the county seat of Perryston. In the nineteenth century Blood Flats had been
home to a substantial meatpacking industry, and the smell of blood had been
said to hang in the vacant fields near the slaughterhouse district, filling the
countryside with a charnel stink. Hence the name. But by 1880 competition from
the meatpackers in Cincinnati had been too severe. The slaughterhouses had left
Blood Flats but the name had stayed. Then a few decades later the Cincinnati
houses had themselves been bankrupted by meatpackers in Chicago—proving
perhaps, that nothing of this world lasts forever.

The thought of Blood Flats made Norris’s field
of vision turn red; and this was no play on the town’s name. In one way or
another, Blood Flats was the source of all his troubles, the reason for the
task that lay before him. Or rather, his problem was one man who polluted Blood
Flats with his very presence.

Norris knew the woods into which Lee McCabe had
escaped; he had hunted and fished in those same woods numerous times since
childhood. If Lee behaved like the typical fugitive, Norris would have a chance
of intercepting him. True—it was a long shot. But he could either try to
capture McCabe, or he could simply stand around and wait for his entire life to
implode.

How many hours had passed since Norris and
Phelps had first arrived at the Tradewinds earlier that morning? Norris wasn’t
sure. From the beginning, though, he could sense that his boss was out of his
depth in this case. Norris realized that he was edgy himself; but he had damned
good reason to be edgy, didn’t he?

Midway through the second witness interview,
Phelps had seemed to realize that the good citizens of Hawkins County would
feel reassured if a police car was out looking for Lee McCabe—even if it was
only burning gas. A double homicide had taken place, after all. So he had told
Norris to make a run of the roads in the direction that Lee had fled.

Norris had eagerly agreed. And for once, he was
not disturbed by Phelps’s incompetence—by the fact that he was far better
suited for and more deserving of the sheriff’s office himself. For once he
forgot about his lingering ambition to challenge his boss in the next election.
Sheriffs in Kentucky were elected to four-year terms, and Phelps had one year
to go before the next election day.

If he could get this problem sorted out, he
would still have a chance of moving on, of trouncing Phelps on election day one
year from now. And by then he would also find a way to take care of his Blood
Flats problem.

Oh my, Ronnie boy,
you’re getting ahead of yourself there, aren’t you? he thought. Norris
gunned the police cruiser’s engine. The Crown Victoria P71 Police Interceptor
surged to the rise of an oncoming hill that afforded poor visibility. Well, he had the sirens on, didn’t he?
It was the local citizenry’s job to get of the way.

Norris knew that the average fugitive was driven
by the desire to put as much distance as possible between himself and the scene
of his crime. Most fugitives traveled in a more or less straight line in the
direction in which they originally fled. That meant that Lee McCabe’s
trajectory would likely intersect Route 168 at some point.

Norris did not know exactly where. He did not
know if Lee McCabe had already passed over the road, if McCabe would behave
atypically, holing up somewhere in the woods, or changing directions.

Removing one hand from the steering wheel,
Norris unsnapped his holster and fingered the grip of his service-issue
pistol. It was a 15-round, .40
caliber Glock 22. To date, Norris had never fired the weapon in anger. The
Austrian-made pistol was a fine gun, the standard-issue weapon of thousands of
law enforcement agencies throughout the world. But this was not the gun that
Norris planned to use if he caught up with Lee McCabe. If he used the Glock, he
would have to account for every round fired. This, too, was standard police
procedure. It was one of the methods that governments everywhere employed to
maintain control of their police. And the task that lay before Norris was not
exactly police business.

Norris barely slowed down as he opened his glove
compartment and removed another weapon—a 9 mm Beretta. He had purchased the
pistol at a gun show in Tennessee several months ago. It was unregistered and
untraceable.

He removed his police-issue Glock from its
holster and placed it on the passenger seat beside him. Then he placed the
Beretta inside the holster.

Norris took a deep breath. A part of him
actually hoped that he would not find Lee McCabe, that the young man would have
enough sense to stay in the woods until he could flee the county, and
eventually, the state. Then he would not have to take this step. In time,
perhaps McCabe would decide to spirit himself away to Mexico or Canada. The
whole problem might go away, and Norris could get on with his life.

But no, that was his own foolishness talking.
Sooner or later Lee McCabe was bound to be caught. And when he was finally
caught, his initial interrogation would likely turn the investigation in an
entirely different direction.

Lee McCabe had probably seen the men who had in
fact killed Tim Fitzsimmons and Jody White. Those men would inevitably be
ferreted out, and then there would be more revelations. Revelations that would
eventually turn Ron Norris the sheriff’s deputy into Ron Norris the convict.

He shuddered at the thought. Prison life was
notoriously brutal for that handful of cops who were stupid enough to turn to
crime—and then both unlucky and stupid enough to be caught. They became the
immediate and constant prey of their fellow inmates. Ex-cops were given no
peace if they landed in stir; they were marked for violent death the moment
they were issued their orange jumpsuits and prisoner numbers.

He remembered hearing of an especially nasty
case that had occurred a few years ago. A state trooper who had been caught
selling stolen property had been sentenced to five years at the Little Sandy
Correctional Complex. A dozen of his fellow inmates had cornered him one night
and stabbed him to death with homemade shanks. The prison coroner later
reported that the murdered ex-trooper had been stabbed one hundred and eight
times.

Norris fingered the imitation wood grain on the
grip of the Berretta as a field of soybeans flew by. He would kill himself, he
decided, before he would expose himself to a fate like that. And he would kill
Lee McCabe before he killed himself. He bore no particular malice toward the
ex-marine. But if he had to choose between his own life and the life of McCabe,
then the young man would come up short.

He happened to glance to his right, and he
noticed a male figure standing in an open field. Unbelievably, it was McCabe.
And McCabe did not appear to be taking any sort of evasive action at the
approach of the crusier. Quite the opposite, in fact: McCabe was waving him in.
The young man’s arms were raised over his head in a V-pattern. He looked vaguely
like he was signaling to an airplane.

Norris couldn’t believe his luck—and he didn’t
dare trust it. At the same time, the object of his pursuit was standing right
in front of him. He hadn’t expected it to go down this way, but he couldn’t
simply walk away from a gift that was so openly being handed to him. Didn’t he deserve
a lucky break, for once?

Still, his heart pounded at the thought of what
he was about to do.

Chapter

17.

“Hands
up, McCabe!” Norris shouted. The command was superfluous. McCabe’s hands were
up even before Norris had stepped out of his cruiser.

The
deputy held the Beretta leveled at McCabe. He had not imagined the encounter
taking place like this, with McCabe surrendering. Norris had imagined that
McCabe would attempt to flee, or perhaps put up at least some token resistance.

“Are you armed?” the deputy asked. “Don’t lie to
me. I saw that gun you were carrying at the trailer park.”

“Yes,” McCabe acknowledged. “In my belt. Behind
my back.”

In that instant Norris almost pulled the
Beretta’s trigger. But he was profoundly disturbed by the thought of killing
McCabe while the young man was looking at him. That would make it too personal,
and there was really nothing personal about any of this business. Norris was
simply trying to save his own life from complete and total ruination.

He knew that he could not have explained this to
the young man who was standing there with his hands raised. McCabe would be
bound to take it personally, and how could you blame him, really?

Norris decided that he would have to get his
prisoner turned around before he shot him. But first he would have to relieve
him of that gun. McCabe might figure out the score in the final seconds and
draw the weapon.

Norris had no way of
knowing for sure if McCabe was right-handed or left-handed—and of course he
could not rely on a truthful response if he asked him. So he decided to rely on
the most likely of the two: the ex-marine was probably right-handed.

“Okay, McCabe. Now I
want you to use your left hand and—very slowly—I want you to reach behind your
back and pull that pistol out of your pants. Drop it on the ground. Toss it
away from you—to your left. Try anything—and I do mean anything—and I’ll blow a
hole in you a mile wide.”

Norris watched as Lee McCabe followed his
instructions to the letter. McCabe’s pistol fell into the long grass.

Norris held his own
gun aloft, aimed at his prisoner’s face. McCabe stared back at him impassively.

“Now I want you to
turn around. And keep your hands up, McCabe!”

McCabe seemed puzzled
by the command but he complied. He probably believed that Norris was going to approach
from behind and cuff him before moving him to the backseat of the cruiser. Even
now, McCabe apparently had not an inkling of the truth.

Norris decided that
he would put three rounds into McCabe any second now—two in the back and a
final kill shot to the head. Then he would walk calmly back to his cruiser and
drive away. Before he returned to his duties, he would toss the Beretta into
the nearby Chickasaw Creek.

It wouldn’t take long
for McCabe’s body to be found, of course. But no one would trace the shooting
to him.

Norris was taking aim
at the spot between Lee McCabe’s shoulder blades when the radio on his belt
crackled.

“Deputy Norris—over. Pick up if you’re out there!”

Norris knew in that
instant that he should disregard the radio and take McCabe down without further
delay, while the young man’s back was still turned. But the sound of Sheriff
Phelps’s voice rattled him. He removed the radio from his belt and pressed the
transmit button.

“Norris here,” he
said. He desperately hoped that the quavering in his voice was not detectable.

“Where are you,
Norris? Have you seen anything?”

“That’s a negative.
I’m in the woods right now—out near the Farm Pond Road. I saw some movement in
the trees and I decided to check it out. But I think it may have been a false
alarm. Probably just a deer.”

Norris was still
holding his walkie-talkie to his mouth with one hand, the Beretta with the
other, when Lee McCabe turned around. McCabe’s motion was slow and steady. He
kept his hands in the air. His eyes bored into Norris.

“What are you talking
about?” Lee said. McCabe had obviously overheard him lying. “The Farm Pond Road
is a good five miles from here.”

“What did you say, Norris?” Phelps asked.

“Nothing. Nothing.
Listen: I’m climbing through some awkward terrain right now. The reception is
bad. Too much static. You’re breaking up. I’ll report in when I make it back to
my cruiser, okay?”

Without waiting for a
response, Norris killed the radio and replaced it on his belt clip. He motioned
emphatically at McCabe with the barrel of the Beretta.

“Who told you to turn
around?”

Lee McCabe ignored
the question, though he kept his hands in the air. “You were lying, Deputy.”
McCabe uttered the last word with more than a hint of sarcasm. “What the hell
is going on?”

Do him now, a silent voice told Norris. Take him out while you still have the advantage.

“Get down on your
knees, McCabe,” Norris ordered.

“What?”

“Do it!” Norris screamed. “Get down on your knees!”

McCabe shook his head
and complied.

“Now fold your hands
behind your head!”

Once again McCabe did
as he was told, though with visible reluctance. Norris noticed that his own right
hand—the one that held the Beretta—was shaking.

Then he heard what
sounded like the approach of a distant motor. And why not? They were beside a highway. Vehicles traveled down
highways, didn’t they? Within a
matter of seconds, they might not be alone anymore. If he was going to do what
had to be done—then he would need to do it now.

Norris felt his
nerves tingle as he tried to steady the pistol. His entire body seemed to be
shaking. He squeezed the trigger once and the shot went wild. The boom
reverberated like that of a cannon.

In the next instant
Lee McCabe threw himself to the ground, where he quickly rolled over and
retrieved his own pistol.

Norris tried to take
another shot. But he could not force himself to stop shaking. He had never been
in a firefight before. This was the first time he had ever fired a shot with
the intention of doing harm.

Now Lee was lying on
the ground in a prone shooting position, his elbows braced on the earth. Norris
could look directly into the muzzle of McCabe’s pistol.

“Are you going to
shoot an officer of the law?” Norris asked pleadingly, because he could think
of nothing else to say.

McCabe leveled the
gun at him. Norris held the Beretta at his side. He became suddenly aware of
the substitute pistol, the weapon he had procured specifically for illicit
violence—violence that now proved to be beyond the capacity of his nerves and
experience.

“I’m going to drop my
gun, McCabe,” Norris said. “Okay? I’ll drop the gun and I’ll go back to my
squad car. We can both pretend this never happened.”

McCabe laughed
bitterly. “Yeah, let’s forget the whole thing. I’ll forget that I’ve been made
a suspect for two murders that I didn’t commit. I’ll also forget that an
officer of the Hawkins County Sheriff’s Department just tried to kill me in
cold blood.”

“It’s more
complicated than it looks, McCabe.”

“Yeah, I imagine it
is. Drop the weapon, Deputy. And walk back to your squad car before I change my
mind.”

Norris dropped the
gun—no, flung it—away from himself.
He breathed a sigh of relief for the fact that McCabe was going to let him
live. And in the same instant, he realized that his larger problem persisted:
McCabe would also survive this encounter; and he might live to reveal
information that would bring the world crashing down on Norris’s head. This
temporary reprieve meant nothing, not in the long run.

“I’m going back now,”
Norris said. McCabe climbed to his feet. The aim of the pistol never wavered.
Norris briefly considered rushing McCabe and immediately thought better of it:
He would be dead before had taken two steps in the direction of the ex-marine.

Norris did as McCabe
commanded him. He turned around and took one deliberate step after another
through the ankle-high grass and weeds. Once when he quickened his pace, he
heard McCabe shout, “I said slowly.”
He wanted to turn around; but he knew that like Lot’s wife, he would doom
himself if he did.

As the cruiser came
within sprinting distance, Norris began to weigh his options. There was a
shotgun in the vehicle’s gun rack, a double-action Remington 12-gauge with a
14-inch barrel. If he could simply get the weapon in his hands and get it
pointed at McCabe, he couldn’t miss. Not with that gun. And he still had his
Glock as a backup.

Maybe that was the
best way. Engage McCabe in a firefight. The cruiser would give him adequate
cover. McCabe would be stranded out in the open field.

Even as he began to
formulate the rudiments of an action plan, Norris realized that the whole idea
would likely lead to his own death. It was a classic catch-22: If he attempted to take McCabe in a
shootout, he would probably end up dead; if McCabe escaped, his life as he knew
it would be over.

Unless he saved
McCabe for another day. If he waited long enough, he might be able to take
another shot at McCabe—later and under different circumstances. And the next
time he would not waver. Or miss.

He would have to make
certain, though, that McCabe would not turn himself in to Sheriff Phelps, or
any other Hawkins County sheriff’s deputy.

“Listen, McCabe!”
Norris summoned all his courage and then took the biggest gamble of his life.
He turned around and faced McCabe. The young fugitive held his gun outstretched
in a two-handed grip.

“You are one
foolhardy son-of-a-bitch,” McCabe said softly. “Give me one good reason why I
shouldn’t shoot you now.”

“This wasn’t my
idea!” Norris protested, the outlines of a plan coming together in his mind.
“Sheriff Phelps put me up to it. He wants you dead, and he told me to snuff
you. The sheriff threatened to kill me and every relative of mine he could find
if I didn’t go through with it.”

Having committed
himself to this story, Norris tried to gauge the expression on McCabe’s face to
see if the young man holding the gun had taken the bait. Norris knew that there
had been a history between Phelps and McCabe’s late mother, and he suspected
that Phelps might be pining over the woman even now. Norris had known Lori Mills
McCabe, of course, and he had never quite understood the sheriff’s
preoccupation with her. She had been attractive enough, but certainly no Helen
of Troy. And in the final years before the cancer took her she had looked
tired, prematurely old, and world-beaten, as people often do when their
expectations for their own lives go radically awry. But Phelps might have
tossed him a lifeline with his old romantic obsession. Norris was willing to
grasp at any straw at this point.

Norris was barely
able to choke out his response. He was transfixed by the muzzle of McCabe’s
pistol, and the realization that it could bring death in an instant.

“All police
broadcasts are monitored,” Norris explained unsteadily. “The sheriff told me to
take care of it quietly. He wanted—what do you call it? Plausible deniability.”

He could not tell if
McCabe believed him or if he recognized the lie.

Then McCabe said:
“Turn around Norris. Turn around before I change my mind.”

“What?” Norris felt
his knees turn to jelly. McCabe was planning to shoot him in the back. Just as
he was planning to kill McCabe only a few minutes ago.

“Do it,” McCabe said.
“Don’t push me, Deputy.”

Norris did as he was
told.

“Now put your hands
over your head and count to one hundred. Count loudly. Loud enough so that
anyone within a mile could hear you.”

Still shaking, Norris
began to count: “One! Two! Three! Four!”

When he reached the
number twenty-eight it occurred to him that he had not heard from McCabe in a
while. But then, he would have had difficulty hearing him above his own
voice—unless McCabe himself was also shouting.

He stopped his count
on number twenty-nine.

“McCabe?”

Norris turned around,
and found himself alone in the field.

Chapter

18.

It
was now mid-afternoon—the hour at which Deputy Norris customarily ate lunch—but
he was not the slightest bit hungry. As he steered his cruiser through downtown
Perryston, he passed the McDonald’s and the Hardee’s entrances without a second
glance. All he could think about was McCabe. McCabe might as well have been
sitting beside him in the cruiser’s passenger seat.

Norris could still see the mixture of
astonishment and anger on the young man’s face when he had first reckoned the
lie. That was before Norris had fired the wild shots and lost the physical
advantage; but McCabe had actually won the encounter in that instant. The rest
of their encounter had seemed almost preordained. For a moment Norris had
believed that Lee was going to shoot him. Norris almost wished that McCabe had
in fact pulled the trigger—a gunshot wound to the back of his head would have
at least put him out of his misery.

The
Beretta was hidden inside the glove compartment. Before he left the field,
Norris had at least had the composure to retrieve the gun from the spot where
he had dropped it. The stowed pistol seemed to mock him, reminding him of how
he had failed to do what had needed to be done. He should probably dispose of
the gun now, as it could be used as evidence against him. Or would it be better to keep it—just in case he had a need for it
again? He wasn’t sure. Norris was used to being on the winning side of the
law. He wasn’t accustomed to the thought patterns of those on the wrong side of
justice.

For days his stomach had been roiling in
anticipation of the Fitzsimmons hit. Now that the big event had actually
occurred, his stomach felt even worse. And the one-sided gunfight with McCabe
had completely unhinged him. He reached into the change tray in the cruiser’s
center console for a roll of Tums. He had gone through three rolls of the
damned things this previous week.

Norris had never needed antacids until a few
months ago, when a smalltime hood named Lester Finn had entered his life,
bearing some incriminating photographs and a fistful of demands. Since then, he
had been fighting a constant war with his anxiety, which escalated into
outright terror at least once daily.

He was a police officer, after all. What the hell was he doing? He was
taking numerous risks—risks that he would have never even considered a few
short months ago. He cringed when he thought about the potshots that he fired
at Lee McCabe. And that was, arguably, not even the most reckless act he had
undertaken in recent weeks.

But another way of looking at it was: What choice did he really have?

Norris drove his police cruiser east on Main
Street, past Perryston’s business district. He stopped at a little park that
lay on the edge of town. The park was dominated by a Civil War memorial, a bronze-plated
statue of a Union soldier holding a bayoneted rifle. Kentucky had been divided
territory during the war—literally brother against brother—and the legacy of
this division was an abundance of Civil War memorials that exceeded the tally
of any other state. Farther south, most of the state’s memorials honored the
Confederates; but Perryston had been mostly Union territory.

Norris parked his vehicle and walked past the
picnic tables and cinderblock bathrooms, to the edge of an encircling woods. He
heard a dog barking somewhere in the distance, but there were no human voices
within earshot. When he had looked in all directions and made sure that he was
completely alone, he removed a cell phone from his pocket. This was not his
regular cell phone, but a disposable one that he had purchased solely for his
communications with Lester Finn.

He knew that Finn would probably be in his bar
in Blood Flats. Conversations with the tavern owner were always unpleasant.
There was no way he could avoid talking to him this time, though.

Norris dialed Finn’s number and the two-bit
mobster answered on the third ring.

“You stupid son of a bitch,” Norris responded
without preamble. “Do you think that any part of this situation is funny?”

“Deputy Norris,” Finn said, the cheerfulness
suddenly gone from his voice. “My mother was a God-fearing woman. You will respect
her memory. You don’t have the protection of your badge anymore. You lost that
the minute you took that girl into your car. Are we clear on this?”

Norris stifled an even harsher reply. He thought
briefly about the girl—the one who had brought Lester Finn into his life in the
first place. She had been no more than sixteen. The girl had been an unfair
tactic. Her memory made his loins feel warm, even as thoughts of Lester Finn’s
blackmail scheme filled him with rage.

“My apologies to the sainted Mrs. Finn,” he
said. “But we have more immediate problems. Your boys botched it.”

“I don’t think so, Deputy Norris. That’s not
what they told me. In and out; a clean hit.”

“No,” Norris said. He felt a rush of stomach
acid surge into his lower throat. “It was not
a clean hit. For starters, they killed the girl. The woman Fitzsimmons was
living with. That wasn’t part of the deal, Lester. She was innocent.”

Lester laughed on the other end of the line.
“Jody White was not innocent. She was
involved, Deputy. She was shacking up
with a known meth dealer. She was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and she
had no one to blame but herself. My men tell me that Jody White tried to pull a
gun on them, and I believe them.”

“There was
no gun anywhere near her body!” Norris said, in a far louder voice than
caution dictated. He looked around again and verified that he was still alone.
“I saw what was left of Jody White’s face after your ‘clean hit’ but I didn’t
see any gun that she could have pulled on them.”

“I
wasn’t there,” Finn acknowledged, as if addressing a child. “But all wars have
collateral damage. This will blow over.”

“If you believe that, then you’re more deluded
than I thought. It’s one thing to kill a meth-head dope peddler with a
twenty-year rap sheet. But your men stepped over the line.”

“So what do you want me to do, Deputy? Resurrect
the dead? Bring back Jody White?

Norris ignored the question. “And you’ve got
bigger problems still.”

“Such as?”

“A witness.”

Finn paused. “I don’t think so. My men went in
there early this morning. They assured me that no one saw them. No witnesses.”

“That’s because they didn’t see the witness. Which might be traced to the fact that you
obviously hired a bunch of idiots. But he
saw them, or at least he might
have.”

Lester Finn now seemed genuinely interested,
though he continued to preserve that devil-may-care pose of his. “And who, pray
tell, is this witness—whom not one of my four men happened to see?”

“His name is Lee McCabe. A local boy. Got back
from Iraq a few months ago.”

“Lee McCabe,” Lester repeated the name.

“You know him?”

“No, but I could find him if I needed to.
Hawkins County is a small place.”

“You’re absolutely clueless.” Norris snorted.
“Jesus, what a piece of work you are.”

“Watch it, Deputy.”

“Don’t you tell me to—”

“So where is this Lee McCabe right now?”

“I have absolutely no idea.”

“What the hell do you mean by that?”

“I mean, I have absolutely no idea. When we
pulled up to Fitzsimmons’s trailer he was there. Then he took off and ran. And
now half the state is looking for him.”

Norris was about to relate his subsequent
encounter with McCabe but stopped himself. Nothing could be gained by telling
Finn about that. In fact, Lester would probably find a way to use that
knowledge to his advantage. Of course he
would, Norris thought. His failed attempt on McCabe’s life raised his
complicity in the murders at the trailer park to a new level.

McCabe and Lester had
him completely trapped, didn’t they? Before his failed attempt on the ex-marine’s
life, there had been a slight chance that Norris could have skated out of this,
even if McCabe was captured, and the wanted man’s testimony uncovered his own
connection to Lester Finn.

Norris figured that the photos of him and that
girl would probably have come out—but that would have meant a misdemeanor at
the end of the day. The rest of his involvement might have been hidden,
buried—if only he had possessed the foresight to take preventative actions. How
much material evidence against him had really existed, before today? It might
have come down to little more than his word against the word of a small-town
drug lord. Who would the system have been
more likely to believe?

But now he had gone and
taken a shot at Lee McCabe. That glaring mistake would be his undoing in the
end.

“What did this McCabe see, Norris?” he heard
Finn ask him.

But what he saw was the image of another young
woman—not the young girl whom had he had been caught with, but the dead one he
had seen this morning. Jody White’s death pose—her shattered jaw and gaping
abdominal wound—was a madman’s movie that kept playing in his mind’s eye. He
had the sudden sense that some discorporate form of Jody White was pursuing him
even now, seeking vengeance for the wicked act that Norris had abetted through
his own weakness and venality.

The air was simultaneously thick and short of
oxygen in his lungs. Stars swam before Norris’s eyes. A mixture of terror,
confusion, and self-despair closed in on him, squeezing his chest like a giant
vise. It was all going to hell in a handbasket, and there seemed to be no way
to halt the downward spiral.

This abundance of tension had to be directed
outward. Norris’s hand tightened around his cell phone. He forced himself to
relax his grip when he heard the first crack of the phone’s hard plastic
casing. He paused to wipe the perspiration from his forehead with the back of
his free hand.

Norris coughed loudly, tasting bile in his mouth
and throat. Then he answered Finn’s question.

“McCabe was inside the trailer. We saw him as he
was walking out. I don’t know exactly what he saw. But there’s a good chance he
saw your men.”

“I wonder what that sorry bastard was thinking,”
Finn said. “Probably trying to play the hero.”

“If that was his aim it backfired. Right now
he’s the lead suspect.”

“It sounds like McCabe put himself in the
perfect position, at least from our perspective.”

How could this man have
gotten such leverage over me? Norris wondered. Didn’t the small-town gangster
understand what a liability McCabe actually was? Didn’t he see where this was
likely going?
“No, not perfect, dumbass,” Norris
said as calmly as possible. “How could you think there is anything perfect
about this? Phelps has asked the state police for assistance. And it’s only a
matter of time before the feds become involved. This is a double homicide we’re
talking about, with an obvious connection to drug trafficking. Do you realize
the significance of what I’m saying?”

“No, I don’t think you do. So let me explain it.
I assume you know what a dragnet is. Right now there is a large, multi-force
dragnet closing around Lee McCabe. And that means it’s only a matter of time
before he ends up in custody. And that means
that Lee McCabe will be talking to law enforcement before long. Now, would you
like to guess how long it will take him to lead the investigation to your men?”

Lester paused on the other end of the line. He
treated Norris to a long, exaggerated sigh before he spoke again:

“Stop calling me that!” Norris shouted. He had
told Lester Finn not to call him Deputy Norris over an unsecured line. But the
hoodlum seemed to take a perverse delight in addressing him as such. No doubt
it brought Lester Finn a perverse sort of delight, reminding them both that he
held a police officer at his beck and call. Norris paused and made another
visual scan of the park. He was still alone. “I’ve told you a thousand times
not to say that over the line. You’re screwing me over badly enough as it is.”

Finn laughed “Don’t get nervous on me now. Let’s
be methodical about this: Do you really think McCabe saw anything at all? Other
than Tim Fitzsimmons and the girl?”

Norris wanted to scream but he restrained
himself.

“Do you
really think we can take the chance? Do you think we can afford to just sit
around and wait to find out? McCabe is a liability. To both of us.”

“Of course I know. And it makes me sick, as it
would make you sick, if you weren’t a dope-pedaling lowlife. But what other
choice is there?”

“Save your self-righteousness for the bums in
the drunk tank, Norris. A fine specimen you are. A few minutes ago you were
turning into a bleeding heart humanitarian over a drug dealer’s dead
girlfriend. And now you want to me to eliminate a veteran who has recently
returned from Saddam Hussein’s little hellhole in the Middle East. You’ll
forgive me if I find that ironic, Mr.
Norris.”

Norris sighed. “I don’t care how you find it. I only want you to take
care of it.”

“That’s what I do, Mr. Norris. I take care of
things. I took care of Tim Fitzsimmons; and I’ll take care of this problem as
well.”

“Well,” Norris said. Maybe this would be work
out, after all. There was still a chance. “Alright, then. But do it quickly.”

“I’ll do it when I decide to do it. You don’t
give the orders in this relationship, Norris. You still don’t seem to
understand that basic fact.”

Norris found himself squeezing his cell phone
again. He couldn’t believe that Lester Finn was such a misguided fool. McCabe
might have knowledge that could send them both to prison for life, and Finn
seemed more concerned with posturing.

Nevertheless, Lester Finn was the only ally he
had at the moment—the only person in the universe who had roughly the same
stake in this outcome. He would deal with Finn later; but he needed him for
now.

“Whatever you say, Lester. Now tell me: Are you
going to take care of this or not?”

“I’ll do it. Get me a photo of this Lee McCabe.”

“You can get yourself one. The Perryston Gazette ran a story on him
when he got back from Iraq. It included a photo of him in his dress blues. It’s
still online. You can Google it.”

“I understand. Good day, Mr. Norris.”

“Wait, when exactly are you going to—“

But Norris was talking to a dead line.

Chapter

19.

Lester
Finn pressed the call termination button on his cell phone while the cop was
still talking. He laid the phone down on the dark hardwood counter of the empty
bar before him. He was trying to get his arms around the fact that a young
veteran named Lee McCabe would have to die. That would be regrettable. He would
much rather put a bullet in Norris, though Norris had proved himself to be a
useful—if unwilling—tool. And the deputy would likely turn out to be even more
useful in the future, now that he was an accomplice to murder. The Tim
Fitzsimmons hit had been carried out based on information provided by Norris.
The deputy had fingered Fitzsimmons as the distributor in the trailer park.

All the same, it would be a shame about the marine.

Lester’s daddy had been a decorated marine in
Korea. The elder Finn had deserted Lester and his mother when he was only five;
and his father had taken his own life while Lester was still in high school. He
had absolutely no respect for his long-dead father as an individual. But blood
was blood. He didn’t relish the idea of killing a man who had some connection
to his father, however tenuous.

Nevertheless, it would have to be done. And it
would have to be done carefully—not botched like the hit on Tim Fitzsimmons.

Lester noticed his reflection in the shiny
surface of the bar: the long, grey hair tied back in a single ponytail, the
network of wrinkles that lined his face. He had not made it to the ripe age of
fifty-two by being careless. But the four men he had charged with the task at the
Tradewinds had obviously made a lot of mistakes; and now he would have to scramble
and take more risks in order to undo the damage.

Lester’s bar, The Boar’s Head, was deserted at
this hour on a Saturday, except for Lester himself and two of his “associates”:
Luke and Dan. Luke and Dan were both strapping young men who had already done a
combined six years in the Kentucky state penitentiary system. The two of them
were seated at a table in the far corner of the tavern, playing cards for
dollar bills. Judging by their respective facial expressions, Dan seemed to be
doing most of the winning. That was the usual course of events, given Luke’s
arrested level of mental development: Lester wondered if the big man could read
and perform arithmetic at even a fifth-grade level.

Not that either one of them was exactly a
walking brain trust. There was one aspect of criminal enterprise that
persistently vexed Lester, and he supposed that it also vexed men in other
lines of enterprise, though in different ways and for different reasons: It was simply hard to find willing and
competent help. Brutal and violent men were a dime a dozen; but a man who
could think for himself and take initiative was rare.

“Hey Dan,” Lester called out.

Dan ignored him.

“Hey, Dan.”

“What?” Dan did not even look up from his hand
of cards.

“Do you think you could stop taking that oaf’s
money for a while and actually earn the good money I pay you?”

“Whadaya need?” Dan asked. He still did not
remove his attention from the deck of cards.

“I want you to round up some men. I’ll give you
the names and numbers. They’re guys we’ve worked with before. I’ve got a little
something that needs to be done.”

“What about the men we just hired for the Perryston
thing?”

“No, they won’t be a part of this. We need to
engage some more competent ones. Like I said, I’ll write down the names for you.
I’ll want them all here in town by tomorrow afternoon at the latest.”

Dan sighed and pushed his chair back from the
table. He laid his cards face down beside his growing pile of dollar bills.

“All right, I’ll get on it.”

“What’s an oaf?” Luke asked.

“Never mind,” Dan said. “This here card game’s
over.”

“But you took all my money!” Luke shouted.

“So? That means this is a lucky break for you.
We need to quit now, before you lose even more money.”

Luke silently shook his head. Lester could
discern the big man’s internal gears working laboriously behind his irritated
stare: He was halfway to convincing himself that what Dan had just said was
true.

Idiots, Lester thought,
shaking his head. I’m surrounded by
idiots. He watched Dan scoop his winnings into a pile and group them into a
neat little stack. If only my granddad
were still around, Lester thought. Wouldn’t
the two of us be able to kick some ass for real?

The Boar’s Head had belonged to Lester’s
grandfather—his mother’s father. (Such a place could never have come from the
line of worthless drunks that had produced his father.) Lester’s granddad had
opened the bar during the final years of World War II. During the war there had
been an army depot just south of Blood Flats, and the Boar’s Head had hopped every
weekend with randy soldiers and victory girls.

The army depot had closed with postwar
demobilization, and the Boar’s Head had reverted to a local bar. Things were
never the same after the war, although the place crept along, supported by
local clientele—as well as various sidelines.

But ah, the war days. Lester had not been
alive during the war; but he had heard the old stories. Sometimes he still
imagined his grandfather moving about the Boar’s Head’s dark interior. In these
daydreams, Granddad was wearing his black dress pants, white shirt, and
suspenders. He walked about with his dust rag, polishing the mirror behind the
bar and the handles of the antique taps.

The old man would still feel at home here. Much
of the interior of the bar was still in its vintage state, exactly as Lester’s
granddaddy had envisioned it.

That was then, and this was now. The noble
generation that had produced his grandfather had passed from the scene, and
younger, degenerate generations had inherited the earth. His two
associates—Luke and Dan—were prime examples of the substandard people that had
sprung from American loins in recent decades.

Luke and Dan were now engaged in another line of
banter, his instructions to them already forgotten. It was no wonder that the
Coscollino family ran circles around him. He couldn’t even manage his people
anymore. Was he losing his touch?

The real problem here was Dan, not Luke. Luke
was a pliable fool who would go whichever way he was led. Dan, on the other
hand, was a born smartass. He had accepted a position on Lester’s payroll, but
he didn’t want to follow orders. If this had been an ordinary business with
ordinary employees, Lester would have simply fired him weeks ago. But it wasn’t
as simple as that when your main lines of business were dope and whores. A
fired employee was bound to be disgruntled; and a disgruntled man could easily
become a snitch.

And so Lester had not really done much of
anything. He had been hoping that the ex-con would see the light on his own.
Instead, Dan was taking even more liberties, and his attitude threatened to
infect the other men in Lester’s employ. Lester had let this situation get out
of hand. He had allowed Dan’s insubordination—and the arrogance behind it—to
fester and grow for weeks now.

Sometimes the best tactic was to force a
confrontation. Lester leaned forward and said loudly over the bar: “I believe I
gave you an order.”

Yelling really wasn’t in his nature. Lester
sometimes imagined that he could run his organization like a normal business.
He occasionally allowed himself to page through books written by Donald Trump
and Mark McCormack—the guy who had penned those books about what they don’t
teach you at Harvard Business School. Lester wasn’t the idiot that he knew many
people believed him to be. As a young man, he had completed six semesters at
the University of Kentucky, though he had never earned a degree.

What good was any
attempt at real management, though, with employees like this?

“I believe
I gave you an order,” Dan said in a mocking falsetto. He poked Luke on the
arm, in a clear attempt to incite him to join in the joke.

Luke looked back at him uncertainly. “Gee, Dan,
I dunno. Maybe we ought to go ahead and do what Mr. Finn says.”

“Shut up!” Dan shouted at Luke. Then to Lester:
“Let me tell you one thing, old man: You ain’t no better than anyone else in
here. Just because you own this dump of a bar and run dope for a bunch of wops
up in Chicago.” He was pointing at Lester. He accentuated his words with little
jabs in the air. “Don’t be thinking you can give me orders, or you’ll learn
real quick where you really stand.”

Then Dan gathered up the playing cards into a
perfect rectangle and began shuffling them. “Come on, Luke. We’re going to play
one more hand.” Luke was silent as Dan dealt a fresh hand of cards.

Lester sighed with the realization that his next
course of action was inevitable. It had been a long time since he had taken
this sort of step with a member of his crew—perhaps too long.

He grabbed an object from beneath the counter
and lifted the little hinged partition that was used for access to the area
behind the bar.

He walked slowly toward the two men seated at
the little table. When Luke and Dan noticed him, their talking ceased.

With the end of the conversation there was near
silence. In the center of the room, an ancient, dusty ceiling fan spun slowly
and creakily overhead.

Luke asked: “Hey, Lester, what are you doin’
with that baseball bat?”

Lester did not answer him. He merely kept
walking closer.

A smirk appeared on Dan’s face. He leaned
casually back in his chair to accentuate his disregard of the threat.

So that’s the way you
want to play it, Dan?
Lester had been prepared to accept an act of contrition; but Dan’s insolent
smile told him that this particular ex-con was beyond redemption.

Then Dan spoke—not to Lester—but to Luke:

“Why lookie here, Luke, Lester gonna come teach
me a lesson!”

As Lester raised the baseball bat, the smile
disappeared from Dan’s face. He actually
thought I was bluffing, Lester realized. Dan frantically reached for a .38
that he kept in a calf holster beneath his jeans. He simultaneously lifted
another hand to deflect the blow that he knew was coming.

Lester swung the bat.

The baseball bat struck Dan in the forearm,
shattering both his radius and his ulna. He screamed. The excruciating pain
caused him to forget all about the .38. His attention was now entirely focused
on the wounded arm. He grabbed his forearm—now jointed where it should not be
jointed—with his remaining good hand.

“You
sonofabitch!” he cried. “You
sonofabitch!”

Then Lester swung the bat again.

This time the bat struck Dan a glancing blow
across the head. His eyes rolled, and he fell backward out of his chair, and
sprawled upon the hardwood floor—the same floor that Lester’s granddaddy had
laid down for his jitterbugging and Lindy Hopping war-era clientele.

And what had Dan called The Boar’s Head?

He had called it a dump.

Chapter

20.

Lester
took a moment to appraise Dan’s condition: he was out cold but the blow had most
likely not been fatal.

“Do as I tell you!” he shouted. Then, in a
quieter voice: “Wait. First go and turn the sign in the window around so it
says that the bar is closed.

Luke nodded and stood immediately. Perhaps he
was simply eager to move away from the shattered form of his friend—if that was
what Luke and Dan had been. Lester frankly doubted that men like Dan and Luke
were capable of forming any bond that approached true friendship.

Luke lifted the sign that hung from a string and
a suction cup in the tinted glass window at the front of the bar. He turned the
sign around so that the “Yes…We’re Open”
side faced the inside.

“Good, now lock the front door, too. Then get
your ass over here and help me.”

Once the front entrance of the bar was secured,
Lester hoisted the top half of Dan’s body by the armpits.

“Grab his feet.”

In this way they lifted Dan off the floor and
carried him toward the rear storage room behind the bar. Dan was a big man, and
his inert bulk was heavy. Even with Lester and Luke both carrying him, the seat
of his jeans bumped across the floor. All in all it was a clumsy operation.

They did not have far to go, and the door to the
storage room was a free-swinging type with no latch. Once they were well
inside, Lester ordered Luke to halt. He abruptly dropped the top half of Dan’s
body. Dan’s head thudded onto the bare concrete floor. Luke waited about five
seconds before dropping Dan’s feet. Dan’s cowboy boots—one of his small-town
tough guy affectations—clattered onto the floor.

Lester silently pointed to Dan. It was an
unspoken command to Luke that even the big dumb man could understand: Watch him and make sure that he doesn’t wake
up.

Lester rummaged around in an adjacent alcove and
removed a folded plastic tarp. He tossed the tarp onto the floor just above
Dan’s head. He walked past Luke and back into the bar area. He returned with
the baseball bat.

Lester laid the bat on a stack of cardboard
boxes that bore the imprint of a well-known Kentucky distillery. Luke seemed
transfixed by the sight of the bat, as if it were some sort of talismanic
object.

At Lester’s instruction, they spread out the
tarp and lifted Dan once again. They edged him over the unfolded tarp and
dropped him for the second time.

Lester lifted the bat by its fat end and
extended it to Luke.

“Take it.”

Luke showed no sign of taking the bat. The big
man looked at the bat, then down at Dan’s figure on the floor. Dan’s head was
cocked to the side. His breath was going in and out in an irregular wheeze.

“What?” Lester asked.

“Finish him,” Lester said.

“Aw, Lester, I-“

Lester knew that Luke had killed before. In
fact, Luke had been imprisoned for killing a man during a bar fight. But there
was a difference between a man who had killed, and a killer. Thus far, Luke was
only a killer of the accidental variety. Even the prosecuting attorney in his
case had agreed that the barroom killing had been unintentional and mitigated
by extenuating circumstances. Otherwise, Luke would still be behind bars.

Lester knew the sort of men he needed if he was
ever going to hold his own against the Coscollino’s. If providence was
determined to deny him men who could think, then at the very least he needed to
have men who would obey.

“Luke, you’ve got to do it.”

“I-”

“Here. Take it.”

Luke reluctantly took the bat. Lester took a few
steps backward. He leaned against a stack of boxes and folded his arms, his
gaze boring into Luke.

Luke
gripped the bat with both hands and raised it over his right shoulder. After
hesitating briefly in midair—perhaps grappling with last-second thoughts—he
swung the bat downward in a mighty arc, connecting squarely with Dan’s head.
The blow produced a cracking sound, and beneath that a more solid thud of both
firm matter and wetness.

“Again!” Lester said. “Do it again, Luke!”

Lost in a sort of trance now, Luke raised the
bat and brought it down a second time, then a third, and a fourth. Lester noted
the glassy look in Luke’s eyes, the face pinched up in fury. Where does a fool like that get such sudden
anger, Lester wondered. What inner
source does he draw it from?

When the bat was wet and red, and Dan’s head was
no longer recognizable, Lester called out for him to stop.

Luke looked down at the object in his hands,
which was now no longer a baseball bat but a gory tool of murder.

“Drop it on top of him,” Lester said. “It’s no
good for anything anymore.”

Luke dropped the bat atop Dan’s chest. Dan’s
shirt was now covered with blood and little flecks of brain matter.

Luke shook his head. “I didn’t want to do that.
No, I sure didn’t.”

Lester clapped him on the shoulder. The gesture
had a quality about it that was almost gentle.

“You did what you had to do,” Lester said. “Dan
was a danger to us all, with that bad attitude of his.”

“If you say so, Lester.”

“And there’s more to it than that, isn’t there
Luke?”

“Hmm?” Luke stared dumbly back at him.

“Dan used to make fun of you all the time,
didn’t he? He used to bully you around, even though you’re bigger than him.”

“Well, yeah, but—”

“I don’t think you liked that very much. In
fact…”

“What, Lester?”

“I think it felt pretty good for you when you
slammed that bat into his head. That’s what I think.”

“Aw, I—”

Looking into Luke’s tense face, Lester saw a
glimmer of understanding. Then the glimmer went out again. Luke was dumb, all right—but
perhaps he was not as dumb he seemed to be. Perhaps a portion of that apparent
stupidity was actually subterfuge. In some environments, an outwardly stupid
man could get away with a lot. He would be consistently underestimated and
forgiven. For a moment he even wondered if the big man was going to cry. Or
maybe Luke would pick the bat up again, and make him, Lester, the second victim
of the bloody tool.

But Luke did neither; and Lester issued his next
set of instructions. There was a lot of work to be done; and in the big scheme
of things the Dan situation was little more than a sideshow.

Lester patted Luke on the shoulder again.

“Wrap him up in this tarp and put in the freezer
for now.”

“We’re going to put him in the freezer?”

“Only for a little while. After dark we’ll put
him in the back of the van. We’ll take some chains and some cinder blocks with
us. Then we’ll drive down to the reservoir near Mosteller Falls. I know a place
where the water is almost a hundred feet deep.”